My Expeirence with Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI)

Someday I typed more than 80 thousand times just in Emacs. This is pretty awesome at first sight but it can cause serious health problem.

Last month, I felt burning pain of my forearms. It is an symptom of Repetitive strain injury (RSI). I realised that if continue typing like that, one day I will never able to do programming, like the Emacs celebrities in Xah Lee' article about RSI.

Since then I've deliberately tried to avoid aimless and unproductive typing, take more typing breaks, think though things before trying, write more on paper.

Conditions are getting better: I don't feel server pain any more, only sometimes uncomfortable.

But I need to find a better way to improve it. Because sometimes I got the idea, but can't touch the keyboard. This feeling really suck.

So I investigated the Hydra package and use it to group related commands together so that use only two keys are needed to perform frequent tasks.

For example, to search something in current project, instead of typing M-x helm proj grep, that's 16 keystrokes, I only need F5 G with Hydra. The implementation is listed in this post.

But calling functions/commands in Emacs counts only a small proportion of my typing; most of the time, I write code and report.

This is where Yasnippets kicks in, it enable me to type less without losing quality. For example, I use this snippet quite often when writing R code,

res <- sapply(seq_len(n), function(i) {
    ## 
})

That's more than 40 keystrokes. Yasnippets can short it to only 6s! After I type sapply and then hit TAB, it will expand to the region above.

I will investigate the Yasnippet package next week. If you know any good tutorials for Yasnippet or snippets for writing R code, please share your resources.